ABSTRACT
When in June 1990 the Uzbek Supreme Soviet declared the "political independence" of its republic, the event marked the culmination of a centrifugal process in relations with Moscow that had begun decades earlier. It focused attention on the Uzbek elite, the prime mover in the process, as a new actor on the Soviet and world scene—a force that could take Uzbekistan further along the path of severing its ties with Moscow. This chapter examines a crucial turning-point in the process, the defeat by the Uzbek elite of Moscow's campaign, launched by Gorbachev in February 1986, at the Twenty-Seventh Party Congress in Moscow, to reassert control over recruitment and promotion within the elite. Moscow's struggle to regain control of cadre policy in Uzbekistan in the light of past practices of recruitment to the bureaucratic elite as they evolved under the posthumously disgraced Sharaf Rashidov from 1959 until his sudden death in October 1983.
